FDA Revamps Nutrition Label, Serving Size Humiliation Ensues

Today in harsh reality checks: The FDA has officially proposed an update to its nutrition labels, featuring larger, bolder, more in-your-face calorie counts and actual serving sizes. Read: the serving sizes people actually consume. Because let’s be real, you do not only eat 15 tortilla chips at a time. No human does.

So it makes sense that the Obama administration wants, as First Lady Michelle Obama writes in the press release, “that you as a parent and a consumer should be able to walk into your local grocery store, pick up an item off the shelf, and be able to tell whether it’s good for your family.”

But the reality is that no one eats only half a cup of ice cream (the Haagen Dazs suggested serving size), so there’s no way you’re only consuming 290 calories at a sitting. (Did no one else have the pint-a-day ice cream plan in college? Anyone?)

For years we’ve been in the delightful position of ignoring proposed serving sizes and calories, and happily scarfing a whole bag of something that purportedly is supposed to be split into two portions.

How much of that boxed mac ‘n’ cheese do you eat? Half? The whole thing? A third? You have some crazy self-control over there, because those little boxes from Kraft are supposed to deliver three 1/3-cup servings of 400 calories apiece.

Chips

Photo credit: fritolay.com

Thanks for spelling this one out for us, Lay’s; each serving is a mere 15 chips, so there’s actually one and a half servings in each of those tiny little bags at the deli. Yowza.

Enchiladas

Dig the enchiladas at Trader Joe’s? We do, too. But we tend to wolf down the whole, well, enchilada. Turns out the serving size for those babies is one enchilada at a time. Doh.

We’ve talked about Oreos before. We all grew up eating them. Did you know that a serving size is two cookies? Two Oreos? TWO. That’s it. Not 10, not 6, not even three, which is where a sane person would stop.

Apparently this new proposal is a good thing for people like us. We’re gonna take a walk around the block and breathe deeply now.